Developers of Windows Phone applications who decided to install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview are in a tight spot: their development tools are having a hard time working with the new test build of the operating system.

Microsoft has responded. The company first absolved itself of fault: “Windows 8 is still a preview release, which means that there are going to be instances of software incompatibility. One of these incompatibilities is unfortunately with the current Windows Phone SDK,” but did promise to work on the issues in the ‘coming weeks.’

To bring you up to speed, here’s what is wrong at the moment: the XNA Game Studio is a pain to install, requiring a work around; Windows 8 can’t run the Windows Phone emulator; .NET 3.5 needs to be installed by itself, or it has issues. The emulator issue is the largest problem of the three.

However, the news isn’t all bad. Microsoft, noting feedback that the preview release of Visual Studio 11 does not support Windows Phone development, said that “[r]est assured, there absolutely will be support for building Windows Phone applications with the next version of Visual Studio by the time it RTMs.” That should keep the pitchforks down. The release of Visual Studio 11’s preview was to highlight Windows 8 development, and not Windows Phone coding, so this lack of functionality it not particularly surprising.